Lecture VI. The Gods Of Egypt. 125
were four also. To each god, as it were, an ape was assigned.
The influence of Hermopolis belongs to the pre-Menic age
of Egypt; we can hardly any longer call it prehistoric. So, too,
does the influence of Nekhen, once the capital of the kingdom [135]
of Upper Egypt. In a former lecture I have already spoken of its
vulture-headed goddess Nekheb, the consort of the hawk Horus,
whose temple at El-Kab guarded the outlet of the road from the
Red Sea, and who was known as Mut,“the mother,”at Thebes.
She was, in fact, the goddess of all Upper Egypt, whose worship
had spread over it in the days when Nekhen was its ruling city.
The gods of the Pharaoh followed the extension of his power.
In the early inscriptions of the First Cataract the vulture-
headed goddess sitting on her basket is identified with the local
divinity Sati (more correctly Suti),“the Asiatic.”From her the
island of Sehêl received its name, and there her sanctuary stood
before Isis of Philæ ousted her from her supremacy. She was
symbolised by the arrow, the name of which was the same as that
of the goddess, and which was, moreover, a fitting emblem of the
hostile tribes of the desert. It already appears on the prehistoric
pottery as a sacred fetish on the“flagstaff”or standard at the
prow of the boat.
The name of Sati, or rather Suti, is remarkable. It was not
only the name of the goddess of the First Cataract, it was also
the name given by the Egyptians to the nomadic tribes of Asia.
But it was not the Egyptians only who used it in this sense. From
time immemorial the name Sutê had precisely the same meaning
among the Babylonians. The fact cannot be accidental; and as
Sutê is of Babylonian origin, we have in it a fresh proof of the
relations of the Pharaonic Egyptians with primeval Babylonia.
But the goddess Sati does not stand alone. There was also
a god Set (or Sut), the twin-brother and enemy of Osiris, and,
like Esau in Hebrew history, a representative of the desert;
while at the Cataract another goddess, Ânuqet by name, is her
companion. Now Ânuqet is the feminine of Ânuq, the Ânaq [136]